Probably. ProjectEvoMap is collecting data on where researchers in evolutionary biology can be found. It’s a little sparse right now — I know there’s a lot more research groups than appear on it so far — so you might want to add yourself (if you’re doing evolution research!) and help populate the data set.
Evolution News & Views, the DI’s Pravda, did something good for a change: they alerted me to the availability of BBC 2’s show, Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell. Here it is!
Of course, you can see why the DI would like this video, since it uses all their favorite buzzwords like “complexity” and “machines” to describe processes in the cell. And it’s true that the cell is complex and contains complex machinery, but that, as I’ve been trying to get through to them for years, does not imply that they did not evolve, because evolution routinely generates complex machines. The evolutionary explanations given are not “spin”, as the DI explains, but good answers for the origin of these processes.
One major caveat: the star of this show is the CGI animation of the molecular activity of the cell, and as usual, it portrays everything as excessively linear and deterministic, and the necessary omission of water from the animation grossly skews the chemistry. One of the scientist narrators, Bonnie Bassler, does briefly explain that everything is stochastic, with molecules bouncing about randomly rather than zooming through empty space directly to their destination. But otherwise, it is a nice basic and rather cartoony overview of what goes on in a cell.
Sean Carroll puts limits on reality. Good stuff; no gods, no magic powers, no life after death…just us as part of a universe with rules.
You should go read this excellent post on Technosociology, which makes two points, one that I’ve written about before and one that I’ve been meaning to write. The first is a rebuke to the free speech fetishists of the internet who regard their ability to shout at someone as an absolute right rather than a responsibility.
…the common equation between not wanting governments to regulate offensive speech on the Internet and the position “therefore everyone should be allowed to post whatever they want” is not just wrong, it is likely going to be the end of the kind of free speech we want to protect because sooner or later, most governments who do want to ban speech on the Internet for political reasons are going to be able to legitimately point at these sites and most parents and other sane people will come down for strong regulations on the Internet. Yes, I believe that these regulations will then be used to crack down on “unwanted” political speech but be assured that most people in the world, including the United States, will choose “less speech” criticizing the powerful if they are convinced that without such restrictions, there is no way to stop predation of children and violating women’s dignity and privacy from proliferating on mainstream sites. (There is high-quality poll data from the General Social Survey which confirms this–free speech as an absolute value is a minority position in the United States). It is up to the Internet community to make this a false equivalence and this requires that “but it’s free speech” is not the first, intermediate and last and only phrase we utter when faced with offensive or intimidating content.
The internet has an abundance of freedoms and a dearth of accountability and responsibility. Somehow we’ve acquired the notion that because it’s possible to create throw-away accounts and use pseudonyms, it is therefore good to create them at will and discard any sense of identity while still pretending to be a good faith contributor to online discussions. And then we get people who are outraged that you won’t listen to them when they rant under an obscene pseudonym that they will change again when you ignore them; and in fact, they get particularly outraged when you do ignore them, because they think they have the right to speak while everyone else has the obligation to listen. The petty obsessives of internet free speech all have a bit of Dennis Markuze in them.
And further, the Violentacrez case has highlighted another mistaken idea: their privilege to abrogate all other rights held by others in the name of their right to free speech. Suddenly, anonymity also becomes their right and no one else’s — they can splatter the faces of teenagers in their underwear on the web to serve their right to masturbation material, but if you dare to reveal that they are human beings with identities in the “real” world, you’re violating their rights.
That’s the second thing I appreciate in this essay. It’s time to stop thinking of stuff we say on the internet as somehow not part of the real world. For many of us, the bulk of our communication with others is through this medium; we have more friends who we know well and talk to regularly here on our screens than we meet face-to-face.
Another variant of the argument has been that “it’s just the Internet.” Chill. This, of course, rests of on something I’ve long been railing against, the notion that the Internet is somehow not real, that it’s virtual or that it is “trivial.” (My friend Nathan Jurgenson coined the phrase “digital dualism” to refer to this tendency). In fact, a reddit contributor makes the argument that Gawker, by publishing the real name and location of the person behind “creepshot” did real harm they have “purposefully taken this off the internet and into real life” and this affects “violantacrez’s future employment and immediate safety.”
“JoelDavis” on Reddit: The reason that axiom [It’s Just the Internet] has taken hold is because the idea is that even if a website gets bogged down in even the worst trolling imaginable, all you have to is realize the website’s no longer worth going to anymore and stop going. Problem solved. With this, a formerly anonymous reddit user has to worry about physical attacks in real life by someone who would view a person like that as a target. In other words, Adrian Chen has purposefully taken this off the internet and into real life so it’s no longer “just the internet.” This affects violentacrez’s future employment and immediate safety. All so Chen could make some money, and no other reason.
This snippet is very revelatory in how it reveals how the construction of what is real, trivial or virtual is indeed an assertion of power & privilege. “JoelDavis” considers predatory photos of children to be “just the Internet” but a person’s name –just their name linked to real acts they committed—to be “real life.” (I again refer to Lili’s great post about what this reveals).
It’s an odd phenomenon, too. When the printing press allowed newspapers to appear, when people sent correspondence around the world through the mail, did anyone suggest that this process was insignificant and that the discussion was less “real” than talking? I don’t think so. I have the opposite impression, that people felt that writing made the ephemera of conversation have more substance and permanence — the act of weighing words carefully and making the effort to lay them down in print made them more powerful, and publication was a conjuration of great power.
The internet made publication trivial. It apparently diminished the substance of communication — no more crackling bits of paper that pile up on your desk. Media like twitter and facebook encourage you to blurt casually, with little attention to the words you write. It leads to the illusion that communication online is as insubstantial as the conversation you had with your cat.
But it isn’t. In the vast howling noise of the internet, what you say has become more important — voices that babble and shriek don’t rise to prominence and become regular draws (they can be brief freak show sensations, though, and we do see a tendency for voices of minimal talent or intelligence striving to become louder through more extreme viciousness or stupidity). Because something is written in the intangible pattern of electrons doesn’t make it less substantial, but instead makes it easier to distribute, copy, and archive — you could burn an incriminating letter, but once it is on the internet, it is spread far and wide and, while not completely unerasable, is harder to remove…and actively trying to remove something tends to make it more noticeable and more widely disseminated. Meanwhile, I’m finding hardcopy to be less useful — I get dunned with so much junk mail, all those crackling bits of paper that offer me new credit cards at low low rates and advertisements for big screen TVs on sale and sweepstakes I must enter to win millions of dollars, that I increasingly devalue stuff that is written down. I used to photocopy journal articles every week and file them away in a cabinet — I’ve still got a huge pile of these things from 20-30 years ago — but now I rarely print anything, it’s far more useful to have a searchable, indexable, archived PDF that I can also instantly email to students and colleagues.
Just because some old fogies don’t comprehend or appreciate the volume and content of all the communication that goes on by this medium doesn’t make it less real. The internet is not the place where a billion ghosts chatter over matters of no consequence — it’s the new reality, the tool that many of us use to make connections that matter. It’s the greatest agent of information and communication humanity has yet invented, and it deserves a little more respect than dismissal as something “unreal” where trolls can roam unchecked.
(via Stephanie Zvan)
(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)
I save the worst for last: the pro-choice (Matt Dillahunty) vs. “pro-life” (Kristine Kruszelnicki) debate on Saturday. Poor Ms Kruszelnicki, a recently declared atheist who opposes abortion, was hopelessly outclassed and outgunned at every point, and relied entirely on bad arguments.
Dillahunty went first, and he staked out a clear and narrowly focused position: that the personhood or “human” status of the embryo/fetus were totally irrelevant to his argument, and that he was building his case entirely on the right to bodily autonomy of the woman. Even if the fetus was judged entirely deserving of consideration as a person (a point he personally does not accept), it would not matter: a woman must retain the right to control her own body.
So what does Kruszelnicki do? Announce right at the beginning that her entire argument was that the embryo is fully human from the instant of conception, and therefore abortion is wrong. She made it clear that she opposes a whole gamut of basic rights: birth control methods that prevent implantation are wrong, because that’s just like strangling or starving a baby; no abortion in cases of rape or incest, because the baby doesn’t deserve punishment; she did allow for abortion in cases that threaten the life of the mother at times before fetal viability, simply because in that case two fully human lives would be lost.
So right from the beginning she was building an argument that entirely ignored anything Dillahunty would say, while Dillahunty would spend the next hour and a half directly refuting the relevance of her case. It was a humiliating rout.
What made it worse, though, was the quality of Kruszelnicki’s arguments. Would you believe that at one point she showed us a grisly video of the outcomes of abortions? Bloody severed body parts, slack gooey limp bodies, puddles of blood with twitching bits of flesh, that sort of thing. There were several different reactions from people I talked to afterwards. Many were just repulsed, and had closed their eyes or walked out of the room when it was shown (oh, yeah, that was an effective tactic in a debate: disgust the audience). Everyone was appalled that such a blatant and logically irrelevant emotional appeal was being made; that’s another brilliant move, insult the intelligence of the audience by assuming that they won’t be able to detect the patent emotional manipulation being practiced.
I had a somewhat different response. I’ve seen surgeries (and done surgeries on animals), and let me tell you, they are unspeakably violent: bodies being cut into and violated, bones broken and cut, torsos cracked and wrenched open — from a naive perspective, every surgery, no matter how benevolent, is terrifyingly brutal. I was unimpressed by a movie that showed the reality of our biological condition. We are full of blood and slime and squirming guts and twitchy tissues, and you aren’t going to sway me by telling me that an invasive surgical procedure is messy and gross.
But the part that really annoyed me is that she repeatedly announced that SCIENCE had declared the conceptus at the moment of fertilization to be fully human. To demonstrate this, she cited several familiar names: O’Rahilly and Moore, for instance. These are people who have authored descriptive embryological texts that take a phenomenological approach, describing the different stages of development. They are not sources that are good for understanding mechanisms or processes, and they definitely do not represent a deep modern understanding of the progressive and emergent properties of development. What she was relying on is that these kinds of texts will state simple facts, like that fertilization produces a zygote with the complete human genetic complement, which they’ll summarize with some shorthand statement that it is a human embryo (rather than a mouse, or a frog, or a fish). From this, the anti-choicers have spun out unwarranted extensions of reductionist statements to claim that they are making definitive statements about personhood or that they’re discussing something as complex as humanity rather than a minimalist statement about genetics.
And they’ve been doing this for decades. That Kruszelnicki is an atheist does not change the fact that she’s using a ridiculous canard that has similarly been used by religious anti-abortionist zealots; she was basically lying about what deveopmental biologists say, and trying to use an unfounded argument from authority as the basis of her debate performance. Bad move.
I actually got to ask her about that. I told her that she was using old descriptive sources and inappropriately extending the implications; I asked her if she had more modern sources with a little more depth, and she waffled and told me that she had lots of recent papers on the subject and that embryologists all agreed on this point (obviously, no they don’t) and she waved a few papers in my direction.
I went up to her after the debate and asked if I could see those sources she waved at me. Suddenly, she couldn’t find them any more. She mumbled something about a “white paper” by an author whose name was unclear, and that she’d find it for me later. She never did, although she and I were both there at the conference for at least 3 more hours. I also mentioned that a “white paper” is not the same thing as a scientific reference; it would be an advocacy statement from an organization with an agenda, and would have very little weight with me.
Here’s the truth: SCIENCE does not make a definitive statement about the moment at which personhood is acquired. It is a product of a complex process with multiple inputs and interactions and no sharply defined transitions that can be pinned to anything as difficult to define as consciousness, identity, and independence. All we can say is that none of those things are there at conception, and all of them are there are sometime after birth, and that anyone who tries to tell you that they are all there unambiguously at some discrete instant in development is lying to you.
Kitty. Victim of the late-Cenozoic extinction at the Page Museum in Los Angeles.
I usually like Scientific American’s short science explainer videos, but this one — Instant Egghead – Are We Facing the Sixth Mass Extinction?” — bothers me for a few reasons.
Fred Guterl starts off by saying that we don’t know yet whether our current extinction event qualifies as a “mass extinction.” It’s a bit of a semantic question, as the threshold for what constitutes a mass extinction is debated, and some rankings put different events in the top five. But let’s just take Guterl’s statement as meaning “we don’t know whether this current extinction is as big as the really big ones we’ve had in the past.” It’s an excellent point. It’s become received wisdom among a certain crowd that we’re facing Big Dieoff 6.0, and reminders that this isn’t necessarily any worse an event than, say, the extinctions at the end of the Eocene are always good. Not that the end-Eocene extinctions were a kitten romp.
The video goes off rather quickly, though, starting with the quick “citation” of a UNEP estimate of up to 200 species extinctions per day, which seems to have been taken urban legend style from an estimate Norman Myers made in the 1970s. Myers gave the range as 50-200, and he was saying 50 in 2006. We’ve seen a lot of estimates by different biologists. In 1993 E.O. Wilson offered an estimate of 30,000 species per year going extinct, about 85 a day. It depends on what models you use, and those models are the topic of debate.
Still, that’s more an editing quibble than anything. Few maintain that species aren’t going extinct faster than is “usual” for the Cenozoic.
There are a couple other WTF moments in the video, chief among them the statement that the end-Permian extinction was caused by Siberian lava flows igniting large coal deposits, creating a atmospheric CO2 spike “on the order of what we’re seeing today.” There’s certainly lots of evidence to support the idea, but it’s not a slam dunk, and other mechanisms remain possible.
There’s also an interesting mention of passenger pigeons that goes nowhere. In the context of species extinction rate models Guterl mentions that there was a population of billions of passenger pigeons in North America for who knows how many millions of years, and yet only two fossils of the species are known. And then he drops it, not explaining the fact’s relevance. I mean, I got there, and you probably did too — it implies that for each species we know went extinct back in the day, there were likely many we don’t know of whose fossils we have not yet found. What that implies in terms of past extinction rates I’m not sure: it’scertain that species we don’t know of went extinct and aren’t counted in the totals, but it would seem equally plausible that species we don’t know about survived the extinctions of the past, or that species we do know about that we now count as victims of mass extinctions actually survived those extinctions but left no trace for a few millon years afterward. Perhaps someone here with a better understanding of paleontology can help me out with this. In any event, it would have been nice to have Guterl finish his thought there.
My biggest problem with the video, though, is in Guterl’s suggestion that our changing the atmosphere’s composition — referring to the end-Permian extinction, as well as the “Great Oxygenation” of the Paleoproterozoic — is what’s got scientists worried about mass extinction these days, given that we happen to be adding CO2 to the atmosphere faster than the Siberian Traps did 252 million years ago. And scientists are indeed worried about the effects of climate change on biodiversity.
But scientists working on studying and preserving biodiversity — which after all is the positive way of saying “not having a mass extinction’ — are worried about a whole lot more than climate change. We could completely solve the atmospheric CO2 overburden on Tuesday and still be faced with an extinction crisis as we plow up grasslands, cut down forests, bottom-trawl the oceans, and build new sprawling cities on land that once supported wildlife.
The IUCN identifies habitat loss as the main threat to 85% of the species it lists as “Threatened” or “Endangered” on its Red List. The Red List includes 391 terrestrial plant species of all threat levels described as potentially threatened by climate change or severe weather, compared to 5,582 that may be threatened by human disruption of their habitat. The equivalent numbers for terrestrial animal species are 1,991 potentially threatened by climate change and 13,388 by habitat disruption.
There are errors inherent in the IUCN data that stem mainly from lack of resources to assess species, but the implication is clear. Climate change is thought to pose a serious threat to many species. Human-caused habitat disruption is likely a more serious threat.
One of the problems I have with the mainstream environmental movement these days is that “environmental protection” has been conflated with “climate change mitigation.” You can search environmental publications in vain for a long time for mentions of other issues. When I started editing environmentalist publications in 1992 — the year of the first Earth Summit, in Rio — public attention was about evenly divided between the importance of preserving biodiversity and the threat of climate change. You can see evidence of this in the newly revamped Google Ngram viewer, by comparing mentions of the relevant phrases in books archived by Google as a function of time:
Expressed as a percentage of text in all books in the database, “biodiversity” peaks relative to “climate change” in 1997, then actually starts to decline in 2003. “Climate change” gains the lead the year the Al Gore’s movie came out. Google’s data runs until 2008. My personal anecdata would suggest that the lead “climate change” started developing in 2006 probably grew dramatically after 2009, with biodiversity likely to catch up a little bit sometime next year due to renewed attention to the issue on the UN front.
The point is that environment has become synonymous with climate in many minds. Thinking of biodiversity as of secondary importance (at best) to climate change has resulted in proposals to stem climate change that would actually harm biodiversity. They include everything from seeding oceans with iron to cutting down rainforests for biofuel soy plantations to siting utility-scale solar plants on intact and biodiverse desert habitat when there are former alfalfa farms in the neighborhood.
By mentioning only climate change in a video that purports to address whether we’re facing a mass extinction, Scientific American helps promote this emphasis on climate change — which is obviously a huge threat — to the exclusion of the greater causes of current extinctions. Yes, it’s a video lasting less than three minutes, but one could easily mention agricultural conversion and overfishing and forest clearcutting in a short video. They aren’t complicated concepts.
By all means, SciAm should rail against climate change. SciAm should persuade people to look at their carbon footprints, to demand changes in the way we run our industrial society, and to challenge the idiots in charge who’d deny any climate problem exists. But this was supposed to be a video on the current extinction event, and you somehow failed to mention the larger causes of that extinction. That does a disservice to SciAm’s viewers — and to the science.
I’m impressed — I had no idea how CGI artists do their work, so it was enlightening to see this video of the creation of a Computer Generated Evil Octopus In A Cage. Except, well, I don’t see what makes it evil. It just looks thirsty, to me.
UPDATE: Greta says people have responded so generously that she doesn’t need more donations. But go wish her well if you haven’t already.
Our friend and colleague Greta Christina, on the heels of losing her father, just got handed some scary bad news:
The bad news is that I was just diagnosed with endometrial cancer. I got the initial biopsy results Saturday, and met with the oncologist Tuesday.
The good news about the bad news: To the degree that there is a “good” kind of cancer, this is the good kind: well-differentiated cells, Class 1, in a body part that I have no great need of and am fine with having removed. But it’s still, you know, cancer.
Greta is one of those people who’s always looking out for other folks; since I’ve started reading her I’ve seen her lend her voice to help a number of people who are having tough times. (I was one of those people this year, dealing with misfortune not even in the same league as what’s Greta’s been handed, but she helped me anyway.)
It’s her turn now. At her blog, she spells out a few ways people can help her get through the next couple of months. But if you’re in a hurry, here’s the shortcut: you can toss her some cash you’re not using here, or sign up for a year’s worth of monthly $5.00 donations here. PayPal links aren’t working due to session data, it would seem, but you can get there via Greta’s post.
And as long as I have the microphone in my hand, knowing that with this readership chances are high that someone else reading this is facing something similar, here’s something to read on surviving cancer that’s helped quite a few people I know when they needed some calm reason and math.
